Today's electronic communication systems are heavily relied on to support a wide variety of user needs. In particular, electronic mail software programs (“email”) have become ubiquitous, and are often the most practical and/or efficient mode of communication available. However, user accessible controls over entities designated for receipt of an outgoing message are limited in typical systems. The entities processed in such systems may be mailing and distribution lists, user-defined groups, individual email addresses, aliases, or other specific types of recipient identifiers as appropriate for the specific communication system. Accordingly, in the present application, lists, groups, aliases and recipients are interchangeably referred to as entities.
For example, a user of existing email client-server software, such as Lotus Notes®, Microsoft Outlook Express®, Eudora®, or Sendmail™, does not have the ability to easily exclude an entity from an ongoing or initial communication, when using mailing lists, groups, and/or individual addresses. For example, an email program user may desire to send an email message to recipients listed in association with an email alias or a mailing list for a set of users, such as “Sales Employees”, while excluding one or more entities within the list from receiving the message. Existing systems provide no convenient mechanism for accomplishing this objective. As a result, the user may be forced to individually input all the entities from the list other than the one(s) they wish to exclude into the destination field for the message. Similarly, if it is desired to exclude an entity from receiving an initial message or ongoing email thread, the current approach is to manually search and delete the unwanted recipient address or lists from destination fields. This shortcoming prevents the convenient use of the “Reply All” function in situations where one or more entities participating in a communication thread are intended to be excluded from a message within the ongoing series of communications.
This problem becomes more difficult in the case of a message in which the only receiving entities specified are specified as lists or groups. First, there is no convenient way to determine the individual email recipients of the message, without some automated way to resolve the component entities of each destination list on the client system. Existing systems do not operate to determine the individual addresses specified by each destination list or group, unless the list or group is local to the client. Moreover, even if the all destination lists and/or groups are fully resolved, the user of the client system must then manually search and delete those entities desired to be excluded from receiving the message.
In the area of bulk email software, sometimes referred to as “spamming” tools, some recipient exclusion capabilities exist. Existing bulk email tools provide the ability to define a recipient exclusion file separate from and outside the user interface for defining, addressing and sending a specific message. Accordingly, such list definition tools are not suitable for general email users, since the exclusion step, even for a single message, requires list manipulation independent from the steps of defining and/or responding to a message. Switching to another window within the user interface window to perform such list editing and/or definition is undesirable from a usability perspective. Moreover, separate list editing steps may be cumbersome when defining and/or responding to individual messages, such as within a message thread using a “Reply All” function. Editing an exclusion file for a small number of desired exclusions is, like manually searching and editing the contents of message destination fields to delete individual recipients, time consuming and inefficient. Thus, while existing bulk email tools are useful for batch processing of “spam” email messages, their overall design and user interfaces leave much to be desired for the general email user.
For the above reasons, it would be desirable to have a new system for controlling the recipients of an electronic message, such as an email message. The system should allow a user to exclude recipients as easily as it allows the user include recipients of a message.